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"A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless."
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"Though the earth contains greater energy and mass than any single being, linked together, "people make the world go-round"."
"Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him."
"When a man's girlfriend's parents ask him what it is that he does for a living: they're not really concerned about him, they're concerned about their daughter's tummy."
"The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there's a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under."
"I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business con."
"The greater ignorance towards a country is not ignoring what its politicians have to say, it is ignoring what the inmates in its prisons have to say."
"It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact."
"Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket."
"Electing a bigot enables further bigotry."
Explore more quotes by John Fowles
"There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not anymore what you will become. It is what you are and always will be."
"When I was going on one day in the car about not having any close friends - using my favourite metaphor: the cage of glass between me and the rest of the world - she just laughed. 'You like it,' she said. 'You say you're isolated, boyo, but you really think you're different."
"Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her."
"Now I understand why you grow so many flowers."She shifted her head, not understanding.I said, "To cover the stink of sulphur."
"There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist."
"Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them."
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